Producing special effects to complement displayed video information

Abstract

A hierarchical publish/subscribe network is employed to produce and distribute special effects to users to complement displayed video information. A top level broker in the network receives a plurality of data streams corresponding to a respective plurality of primary special. A service provider makes a subscription request for one of said primary special effects and receives the corresponding selected data stream. The selected data stream is transformed into at least one further data stream, corresponding to a further special effect. The further data stream is published to a lower level broker associated with the service provider. In response to a user subscription request for the further special effect, the lower level broker publishes the further data stream to a user interface for presentation to the user in association with the displayed video information.

What is claimed is: 
     
       1. A method of providing subtitle or captioning data to viewers of a video program, the method comprising:
 at a video source, storing video program content and corresponding text, transmitting the video program content to a viewer; 
 in addition to transmitting the video program content to a viewer, providing the corresponding text, comprising subtitles or captioning for the video program content, to a messaging client of a publish/subscribe system; 
 accessing the publish/subscribe system to publish the corresponding text by, with the messaging client, transmitting the corresponding text to a top level broker of the publish/subscribe system for distribution via the top level broker and at least one mid-level broker to a number of subscribers in the publish/subscribe system; and, 
 with the at least one mid-level broker, accessing a service provider, where the mid-level broker transmits the corresponding text to the service provider and receives back a different version of the corresponding text from the service provider for distribution by the mid-level broker to a number of subscribers in the publish/subscribe system.